Radio Sumer/WRN: an identity crisis?
Tarek Zeidan made a very interesting observation:
"Yesterday while trying to record the ID of Radio Sumer on the HotBird (12597 V 27500 3/4) I noticed something funny before the begining of the transmission at 1900 UTC. They kept on playing the musical theme used on the introduction of the transmission for both Radio Tikrit and Radio Sumer for almost 10 minutes non stop...but I noticed that on the frequency in the background there was the French section of World Radio Network !!"
Interesting indeed. The story of the audio file is a long one, but basically Tarek recorded it on a Mac using the True Voice format, which I couldn't read at Radio Netherlands because the mail server (probably the virus checker) had done something weird to the file. Well, I got it here, converted it to a WAV file using a command line conversion program (I grew up with MS-DOS. so that wasn't a problem) and finally to Real Audio.
Of course, I can't access the Radio Netherlands audio server from outside the building, and since tomorrow is a national holiday here I won't be in the office. So I've put it on my own Web site. Unfortunately I can't stream it so the file (520k) will have to download first before you can play it. Here's the link: http://www.agsmedia.nl/sumer030428_56.rm
UPDATE 2015 UTC: Lou Josephs says this is probably crosstalk between different audio subcarriers on this transponder of the Hotbird. All the WRN services are also on the same frequency (12597). Both the French and German services of WRN can be heared on the recording. It would be interesting to know if this problem occurred on the mediumwave transmission, as I assume they use the Hotbird signal to feed the mediumwave audio.
9:02:06 PM 
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